Turning immigration into a tool of social engineering

In the run-up to the UK General Election, spiked will publish a series of essays reposing political issues. The aim of the ‘Question Everything’ essays is to encourage people to rethink the past, the present and the future. In this second essay, Brendan O’Neill argues that New Labour relaxed immigration controls as a cynical exercise in social engineering, raising important challenges for those of us who support freedom of movement.

In recent decades, various UK governments at various different times allowed a certain number of migrants to enter Britain for economic reasons, in order to compensate for a lack of labour or to boost a flagging industry. Under the New Labour government of the past 13 years, something rather different, new and dangerous occurred: migrants were allowed into Britain for political reasons, to achieve social objectives rather than economic ones.

Where earlier immigrants were expected to build physical infrastructure, New Labour hoped that allowing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants might fashion a new social and moral infrastructure. The government relaxed immigration controls, between 2000 and 2008 in particular, not because it has any attachment to the idea of free movement, but as an instinctive exercise in social engineering. It was a subconscious attempt by a disoriented elite to renew Britain, to redefine it, through altering the social make-up and elevating the virtues of the migrant above the virtues of traditional British nationalism and the native working classes.

Under New Labour, the number of migrants entering Britain rose exponentially. The era of controlled mass immigration to Britain started in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with the arrival of workers and families from the West Indies and South Asian countries as well as from Ireland and old Commonwealth nations. During that era, however, and for all the scaremongering of Enoch Powell and others, Britain remained a country of net emigration – that is, the number of people leaving was higher than the number arriving. In the early 1970s, for example, annual net immigration to Britain stood at minus 50,000.

From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, net immigration was a negative figure, flitting between -50,000 (early 1970s) and -75,000 (1981). In the mid-1980s, it became a positive figure, but stayed between 40,000 and 50,000 between the years 1986 and 1996 (1). It is in the late 1990s that net immigration rises dramatically. In 1998, a year after New Labour was elected, net immigration was almost 150,000; in 2001 it was around 160,000; in 2004 it had risen to around 225,000 (2). Many different factors impacted on the shifting number of immigrants from the 1950s to today: economic downturns and booms play a role in determining whether migrants will come to Britain, and in 2004 the European Union was expanded to include Poland and seven other Eastern European countries, leading to increased movement of Eastern workers to Western Europe. However, one under-explored factor is New Labour’s use of relatively relaxed immigration to achieve, in its words, the ‘social objective’ of ‘[making] the UK truly multicultural’ (3).

Some of us who support opening the borders, including spiked, have long argued that the hundreds of thousands of people who came to Britain over the past decade are not responsible for Britain’s social and infrastructural problems. To blame the arrival of migrants for overcrowded trains, overstretched hospitals, the housing crisis and ruptures in ‘social cohesion’, as some observers do, is to project political failings on to families arriving from overseas. If Britain’s public services are in disarray, and its communities divided, that is down to a lack of vision and investment here at home, not the desires of people from abroad for a better life.

However, that doesn’t mean that there are not serious problems with the way in which New Labour has encouraged immigration (in an underhand, dishonest, censored fashion) and the reasons it has done so (to try to engineer a new kind of society). Britain’s political elite has effectively weaponised immigration. But where in the past it weaponised it through the politics of race and of anti-immigration, today it has turned being pro-immigration into a weapon, into a tool for expressing its discomfort with Britain’s traditionalist past and its distance from Britain’s native working classes. Amongst the elite, taking a ‘pro-immigration’ stance has become a way of espousing its supposedly superior values of cosmopolitanism, liberalism, official tolerance and official anti-racism, and of disciplining and policing those who do not possess such values. Such cynical politicisation of immigration has potentially increased community tensions, further racialised everyday life, and contributed enormously to the contemporary distrust of mainstream politics.

Social objectives

In recent months there have been many interesting revelations about New Labour’s immigration policy, but in keeping with our era of dumbed-down political debate the revelations have either been downplayed or have been used to fuel conspiracy theories.

At the end of last year, a former government adviser revealed that ministers frequently discussed ‘open[ing] up the UK to mass migration’. But their aims were as much political and social as they were economic. Indeed there was a ‘driving political purpose’: ministers’ belief that bringing in more immigrants would make manifest their ideal of a ‘truly multicultural society’ and allow them to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’ (4). Here, we can see how ‘diversity’ is looked upon by New Labour as more than a fluffy value – it is also considered an explicitly political tool that might be used to boost Labour’s fortunes and denigrate its critics.

At the start of this year, government documents released under a Freedom of Information claim confirmed what the government adviser said. In one, written in 2000, officials discussed their desire to ‘maximise the contribution’ of migrants to achieving the government’s ‘social objectives’. The document makes clear that New Labour, unlike previous governments, is keen to exploit the ‘social benefits’ of increased immigration. It argues that it is ‘clearly correct that the government has both economic and social objectives for migration policy’, and lists the ‘social impacts’ of immigration as including ‘a widening of consumer choice and significant cultural contributions’. ‘Migration policy has both social and economic impacts and should be designed to contribute to the government’s overall objectives on both counts’, the document proposed, describing this as ‘a considerable advance on the previously existing situation [where immigrants were allowed in primarily for economic reasons]’ (5).

Strikingly, these discussions were kept as far away from the public as possible. The government adviser says there was ‘an unusual air of… secrecy’ in government discussions about immigration, and the internal document of 2000 was passed between ministers with ‘extreme reluctance’: ‘there was a paranoia about it reaching the media’ and causing concern amongst Labour’s ‘core white working-class vote’ (6). Indeed, when the 2000 document was published as a consultation paper in 2001, it was heavily edited: all mentions of the ‘social objectives’ of increased immigration were removed (7). This provides a glimpse into the elitism that drives the ‘pro-immigration’ stance today, where migrants are considered socially beneficial while the white working classes are looked upon as volatile, potentially racist, and best kept in the dark.

Unfortunately, these interesting revelations have not generated any interesting or serious debate about New Labour and immigration. Liberal commentators have brushed them aside as unimportant. Right-wing commentators talk about a vast conspiracy by the New Labour government to remake Britain in its own image. Incapable of political nuance, New Labour’s critics have railed against what one commentator describes as ‘The secret plot to destroy Britain’s identity’ (8). Others have accused Labour of ‘using immigration to turn Britain into a nation of Labour voters’ (immigrants are more likely to vote Labour than Tory), where Labour has ‘deliberately tried to re-engineer Britain for its own political advantage’ (9).

The idea that the government’s attraction to the ‘social benefits’ of immigration was driven by a simplistic desire to magic up readymade Labour voters both overestimates the elite’s internal coherence and underestimates the profound moral and political crises that have combined to reshape the immigration issue over the past decade. There has been no plot or conspiracy by the political elite – rather it is drawn instinctively to immigration because it is an issue that allows it to distance itself from Britain’s past and to redefine itself as cosmopolitan and constantly changing. And this is not about simply winning votes – rather the reshaping of immigration has been driven by an historic and profound crisis of values amongst an elite which now sees more virtue in what newcomers can bring to Britain than in what its own predecessor elites created and achieved.

Disavowing the past

Those who claim that New Labour relaxed immigration controls in order to remake Britain in its own image are missing the main point: that New Labour’s instinctive attraction to immigration is a product precisely of its lack of real values, of its cultural and political disorientation and uncertainty about what to make Britain into. What the elite likes most about the immigrant is the idea that his arrival and his presence constantly remakes Britain, so that the absence of core British political and moral values can be glossed over with the positive-sounding notion that ours is a nation of forever-changing values, reflecting, in the words of one government minister, ‘the influences of the many different communities who have made their home here’ (10). Indeed, there has been an important shift over the past 30 years from emphasising the assimilation of immigrants into the values of British society to celebrating British society’s assimilation of the immigrants’ values.

For the contemporary elite, taking a ‘pro-immigration’ stance is a way of creating a distance between itself and ‘Old Britain’, a way of disavowing elements of the past, whether it is imperial values, outdated ideas of ‘Great’ Britain, the old-style education system, or aspects of British culture. As the former government adviser said at the end of last year, one of the reasons ministers wanted to increase immigration was to ‘render [the old right’s] arguments out of date’ (11). In a speech and report published in 2001, New Labour argued that there was little fixed about ‘British identity’ and that the ‘changing ethnic composition of the British people themselves [through immigration]’ can only ‘strengthen and renew British identity’ (12). Behind the PC-sounding language, it is a profound discomfort with the ‘identity’ of Old Britain – fixed, homogenous, nationalistic – which leads the elite to celebrate the impact of immigration on British identity today.

In April 2001, Robin Cook, then New Labour foreign secretary, gave a key speech on immigration to the Social Market Foundation. The speech is best remembered for Cook’s line describing chicken tikka masala as ‘a true British national dish’, yet the rest of it was extremely revealing. Cook outlined the reasons why his government was determined to relax immigration controls and made clear his hostility to ‘outdated’ ideas about Britishness. ‘The British are not a race but a gathering of countless different races and communities’, he said. And this lack of a singular notion of Britishness is precisely what gives Britain its strength: ‘[Our] pluralism is not a burden that we must reluctantly accept. It is an immense asset that contributes to the cultural and economic vitality of our nation.’ (13)

The most striking aspect of Cook’s speech was the period in British history he was most keen to distance himself from: the 100 years from the Victorian era to the Second World War. With remarkable historical illiteracy, Cook argued that Britain had ‘always been multicultural’: ‘In the pre-industrial era… Britain was unusually open to external influence, first through foreign invasion, then through commerce and imperial expansion. It is not their purity that makes the British unique, but the sheer pluralism of their ancestry.’ However, there was a period when, unfortunately in Cook’s view, British identity was relatively homogenous: ‘The homogeneity of British identity that some people assume to be the norm was confined to a relatively brief period. It lasted from the Victorian era of imperial expansion to the aftermath of the Second World War and depended on the unifying force of those two extraordinary experiences.’ For Cook, New Labour’s celebration of diversity today is in keeping with an older British history, one that preceded and therefore was not tainted by the now largely discredited modern industrial era. ‘The diversity of modern Britain expressed through devolution and multiculturalism is more consistent with the historical experience of our islands’, he argued (14).

Here, we can see what underpins the contemporary elite’s embrace of immigration: a desire to distance itself from a past it feels increasingly estranged from, by elevating the contribution of external actors to British society and identity. Feeling ever-more alienated from the values and advances of modern, Victorian and post-Victorian Britain – from the growth of industry to the celebration of high culture, from old-style morality to values such as the ‘stiff upper lip’ – today’s elite contrasts the dynamism of the contemporary flow of ‘many cultures’ into the UK with the ‘homogeneity of British identity’ that existed in what is now seen as the problematic modern era.

For all Cook’s and others’ seemingly progressive attacks on ‘purity’ and ‘homogeneity’ in favour of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’, what they are really questioning is the idea that there should be any overarching, defining values in British society. They are effectively dressing up Britain’s crisis of values, its uncertainty about what it stands for, in the positive language of a ‘constant churn’ of values from outside (15), where the immigrant is celebrated precisely for his lack of attachment to, and origins in, Britain’s traditional culture. This is what underpins the ethos of multiculturalism itself: a desire to re-present a crisis of values as something positive. Fundamentally, multiculturalism is officialdom’s response to the profound identity crisis of Western society, brought about as a result of the collapse of common values, national institutions and political networks. Multiculturalism is about adding a positive gloss to this identity crisis, where the lack of common values is sexed up as ‘cultural pluralism’ and divisions within communities are relabelled ‘diversity’. Likewise, the contemporary elite’s celebration of society’s ‘continually changing values’ as a result of unpredictable migrant flows re-presents a crisis of core values as something purposeful and positive.

Indeed, the most striking thing about immigration over the past 10 to 15 years is how the elite now advertises its assimilation of immigrant culture rather than calling for immigrants to assimilate into British culture. One historian of immigration in Britain writes that in the 1950s and the 1960s, ‘The first official British response [to mass immigration] was to declare that immigrants must be assimilated to a unitary British culture’ (16). Now, in New Labour’s words, ‘Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Our lifestyles and cultural horizons have also been broadened [by immigration]… it reaches into every aspect of our national life.’ (17) There were many problems with the old idea of immigrant assimilation, but it was at least built on the notion of a core society into which immigrants could be welcomed. The new idea of Britain ‘absorbing and adapting’ and being constantly altered by the arrival of migrants effectively says there is no such thing as society (updating Thatcher’s dictum), only various cultures. Where the politics of assimilation spoke to a society that needed migrant workers and wanted them to be well-behaved, the politics of absorption speaks to something worse: a society that welcomes immigrants for the narrow political good of the elite, which hopes that the arrival of outsiders will somehow refresh and renew a corroded and confused nation alienated from its traditions. This is the political equivalent of slumming it.

Disciplining the working class

If the elite now expresses its discomfort with Old Britain through the immigration issue, it also expresses its disdain for the lower orders through it, too. In many ways a perfect issue for a fundamentally middle-class party like New Labour, the ‘pro-immigration’ stance allows the contemporary elite both to distance itself from the traditional elites of the past and from the working classes of today, from the old order and from the new masses. For decades, the British elite used the politics of racism as a way of keeping the working classes in their place, ratcheting up immigration fears and racial tensions in an effort to win native workers’ loyalty. Now it uses the official politics of ‘anti-racism’ and ‘pro-immigration’ to do a similar job. One of the most effective ways in which the working classes are policed today is through the monitoring of their allegedly problematic attitudes to immigration and their failure to embrace the apparently superior cosmopolitan values of their rulers.

In elite circles, it is now widely assumed that the key ‘immigration problem’ is not immigrants themselves but the response their arrival might provoke amongst the working classes and what Trevor Phillips, head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, describes as ‘an angry, embittered, permanent underclass looking for targets on whom to vent its rage’ (18). Indeed, today, when members of the elite do call for curbs on immigration, they do so in the name of preventing the working classes at home from going wild rather than in the name of keeping ‘wild foreigners’ out of the UK. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, summed up this trend when, in early 2010, he and his Balanced Migration campaign group called on the government to lower immigration levels in order to avoid playing ‘into the hands of the far right [by failing to] address the concerns that have led to some otherwise decent people supporting modern-day fascism’ (19). In the past, authoritarians and snobs sought to restrict immigration in order to keep ‘alien cultures’ out of Britain – now they want to restrict it in order to dissipate the ‘alien cultures’ lurking within Britain’s own working-class communities.

It is through the issue of immigration that the working classes are most explicitly attacked today, for being feckless, illiberal and slovenly. Liberal opinion-formers who are normally relatively guarded in their expressions of disgust for the lower orders feel able to let rip through the issue of immigration. One columnist praises ‘hard-working bloody foreigners’ who get jobs in Britain because ‘our own people are either too lazy or expensive to compete’. Apparently, ‘tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent British scroungers on their couches drinking beer and watching daytime TV’; immigrants are ‘despised’, the columnist says, only because they ‘seize opportunities which these slobs don’t want’ (20). Other observers contrast ‘pleasant asylum seekers’ to the ‘fat twats’ of working-class Britain (21). Frequently in commentariat circles, the values of the working classes are attacked by being contrasted with the values of the immigrant classes.

Such is the apparent backwardness of the working classes’ attitude towards immigrants that politicians now police their own speech in order to avoid stirring up the natives. In recent General Elections, leading race relations groups have encouraged the party leaders to sign pledges promising not to use ‘inflammatory’ language when discussing immigration, since ‘the right to free political expression must not be abused in the competition for popular votes by causing, or exploiting, prejudice’ (22). In the 2001 General Election, Labour encouraged its MPs and candidates to avoid using the term ‘foreigner’ in any kind of derogatory way and said nobody should ‘fight an election by exploiting the worst instincts of fear and prejudice’ (23). This is about taking a ‘Not in front of the children’ approach to immigration, on the basis that the lower classes will be inflamed if they hear the word ‘foreigner’ or know the truth about how many immigrants have come to Britain.

In the political elite’s view, the real ‘foreigners’ in Britain are the white working classes. It looks upon them as an inscrutable, incomprehensible mass, relating to them as an anthropologist does to a tribe rather than as democrats should to the demos. At the end of last year, the New Labour communities secretary, John Denham, drew up a list of the top 100 ‘extremism hotspots’ in the UK where social deprivation threatens to ‘fuel far-right extremism’. They were mostly poor working-class communities, of course, and Denham promised to try to rescue them by pumping in millions of pounds for social improvements and awareness-raising projects on immigration and other issues. ‘If we fail’, he said, ‘the danger is that extremists will try to exploit dissatisfaction and insecurity in ways which will pull communities apart’ (24). This is a modern-day version of writing off certain communities as ‘beyond the pale’, as moral no-go zones, socially warped areas in need of re-education in the values of their elite superiors.

The ‘pro-immigration’ pose of the contemporary elite allows it to advertise its alleged moral superiority over the uneducated mob. Today, the elite defines itself as superior to the masses, not through its traditions, its role in history or its defence of Great Britain and British values, but through the very opposite: by affecting a cultural disdain for traditionalism, nationalism and sovereignty in favour of the modern values of cultural flux, cosmopolitanism and what Robin Cook described as a ‘modern notion of national identity [not] based on race and ethnicity’ (25). It is the elite’s apparent ability to rise above the squalid traditions of the past that marks it out as superior today. And one of the key ways it does is this is by celebrating (controlled) immigration for ‘shaking up’ British values and forcing the illiberal lower orders to confront their prejudices or else have them fixed by a heavy dose of intervention by the Department of Communities.

This represents a significant turnaround: in the past, British elites strictly controlled immigration in order, they said, to preserve British values and decency; today the British elite takes a more relaxed (though not libertarian) approach to immigration in an attempt to create a new kind of British decency. One thing remains constant, however: immigration remains highly politicised, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Racialising everyday life

There are many problems with the elite’s adoption of a ‘pro-immigration’ stance for cynical social and political reasons. It is built on dishonesty and censorship, where the facts and the truth are kept away from the public lest they inflame our prejudicial instincts. It is driven by a disdain for some of the gains of the past and for the views of today’s working classes. Most worryingly, it can only further racialise everyday life in Britain. Already, thanks to New Labour, virtually every aspect of our existences – from politics to schools to the workplace – has been racialised, where everyday interaction and speech is governed by a plethora of diversity codes and a super-sensitivity about racial matters. The politicisation of the immigrant, and his elevation as superior to the white working classes, threatens to take this racialisation to another level.

All of this raises some important questions for those of us – like me – who support open borders. For today it is often those who present themselves as ‘pro-immigration’ who are the least progressive, expressing a profound cultural snobbery and adopting the immigrant as a cover for their own lack of attachment to a political vision or moral values. And often, those who seem ostensibly ‘anti-immigration’ – for example, some working-class voters who express discomfort with the arrival of people from abroad – are expressing an understandable, if misplaced, agitation with the values of the cosmopolitan elite. When immigration is increased without any public debate about why it is being done, when old-style British values are judged to be inferior to new cultures from overseas, and when immigrants are continually held up as better beings than Britain’s native working classes, is it really surprising that some people ask awkward questions about immigration? Having politicised ‘pro-immigration’ for poisonously elite purposes, our rulers cannot feign shock when ‘anti-immigration’ becomes a political factor, too.

The truth is that celebrating immigration as a ‘social good’ is no more progressive than treating it as a narrow ‘economic good’: in both instances, the needs and desires of individual migrants and their families are subordinated to an abstract, external measurement. The only ‘good’ in this debate should be the argument that it is good for individuals to have full, unfettered freedom of movement with no interference from the state. And if we want to win that argument, we will need to challenge New Labour’s transformation of immigration into an elite weapon, and take the debate to the mass of the population.